


Five Conversations Not With You

by Page161of180



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: (sort of), 5+1 Things, Angst, M/M, Quentin is not in a good place, Unresolved Ending, brief (canon consistent) suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 08:50:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18206243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Page161of180/pseuds/Page161of180
Summary: “In a real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o’clock in the morning.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1945.“In a real dark night of the soul, there is a monster with your face and eyes.” Quentin Coldwater, 2019.The night before he must decide whether there is a price too high to save the one you love, Quentin has five conversations.(And one?)(And one.)





	Five Conversations Not With You

**Author's Note:**

> Friends, season 4 has my heart in a vice grip. The slow-boil of Quentin, beset by the monster with Eliot's face (and eyes), unwilling or unable to talk to anyone about what he's truly feeling, becoming more and more myopically focused on saving Eliot has caused an ache to settle in my chest that I can't make go away. It feels inevitable that the tension will snap and Quentin will do something unbearably reckless to get Eliot back.
> 
> But. Part of me keeps wondering if the tension is actually building in the opposite direction. If maybe the tragedy of hearing Quentin kick aside every consideration but Eliot so many times is that a point will come where he's forced to accept--or at least to seriously consider whether--the cost of giving the Monster what it wants is too high to justify, even if the cost of refusing is Eliot. This story explores what that might look like. Please heed the tags; Quentin is not in a good place. It's no worse than what we've seen and heard in canon, but canon is pretty rough for our boy right now. 
> 
> Be warned that this story doesn't have a happy ending. It doesn't have a sad ending, either. I think it's fair to say that it doesn't really have an ending at all. It, like the rest of us, is just waiting to see what Quentin will do with the impossible situation he's been put in. (I promise that I am working on something with some light at the end of the tunnel, some actual catharsis, but this insisted on being written first.)
> 
> Canon-consistent through 4x09.

1.

 

The clock on Marina’s microwave reads 3:00 when Penny-23 pops back into the apartment. The Monster has been asleep since dinner time. Well, “dinner time,” anyway. Quentin hadn’t eaten. Quentin doesn’t eat, period. It’s a thing he used to do, a thing that more vaguely people-like creatures still do, probably. The Monster may have fed him cheese puffs recently. There was a poptart also, maybe? Like, the chocolate s’mores kind? That’s enough to be living off of, right?

 

Anything that’s happening right now is enough to be living off of, right?

 

“Yo-- the fuck are you doing sitting in the dark?”

 

Penny-23 sees Quentin perched on one of the kitchen barstools and jumps back. Quentin moves quickly to shush him, jerking his head at the Monster laying across Marina’s couch. It has its legs pulled into its chest and its knees hang over the side. Of course they do. They always did.

 

“How long has he been passed out for this time?”

 

Penny’s talking quietly now, and Quentin is grateful. Because the Monster won’t wake up. Because the Monster will actually sleep. They sound like the same thing, but they aren’t.

 

“Awhile,” he answers.

 

The Monster does this, sometimes. Just-- passes out for a day, a day and a half. When it happens at the apartment, Quentin spends the duration in existential terror, staring at its chest to make sure there’s still a rise and a fall. He tries to limit himself to looking no more than every three minutes. Sometimes he manages it.

 

When it happens not at the apartment-- well, Quentin chooses to believe that it _does_ happen not at the apartment, sometimes. That’s the way Quentin makes it through, when they don’t see it for a day, two days. It’s passed out somewhere, sleeping. Chest rising, chest falling. That’s all.

 

(It’s a clever monster, Quentin thinks, that makes you need it to be near you, more than you want it to go away.)

 

(For the record, the days and weeks where the Monster doesn’t sleep at all aren’t any better. Quentin’s blood pressure rises with every new bag under his-- its-- eyes. And Quentin spends a lot of time looking just below its eyes, okay.)

 

Penny is watching Quentin as Quentin watches the Monster. He looks the way they all do anymore, like they can’t decide if Quentin’s on their team or _its_. As if any of them could possibly hate this thing more than Quentin does.

 

(It’s a clever monster, Quentin thinks, that makes you need it to survive, more than you want to kill it bloody for hurting _Eliot_.)

 

“So,” Penny finally says, when Quentin makes no effort to break the silence. “You decided what you’re going to do when it wakes up?”

 

Quentin breathes out and closes his eyes. Maybe he should have forced the issue on dinner. His stomach is groaningly empty. It reminds him in some ways of when Teddy was a month old and suddenly developed what the healer on Fillory didn’t call colic. Just-- wailing around the clock. Everytime Quentin went to put a morsel of food in his mouth, Teddy needed something-- to be held, to be changed, to scream in Quentin’s face. It was even worse on Arielle, but Eliot made sure she ate, since she was the one who had to nurse the baby. Eliot kept--

 

This in no way reminds Quentin of when Teddy was a month old.

 

“Man, I get that this sucks for you,” Penny was saying, “I sympathize, I do. But I’ve seen how this story goes, when you think you’ve got shit more under control than you do.”

 

_Does_ Quentin think that? It’s news to him, if so.

 

“I’m just saying, I can’t let that go down again. This whole situation is bigger--”

 

They all act like the size of the problem has escaped Quentin’s notice. Like if they just explain to him that the consequences are fucking-- _universe-level_ life or death, Quentin will snap out of and see that Eliot is a worthy sacrifice. Quentin _gets_ it, all right? He gets that there are bigger things at stake than Eliot’s life. He’s not so obtuse or so selfish that he really thinks that Eliot’s life matters more than the good of all the worlds, at least not to anyone but him. He’s not such an _idiot_ that he doesn’t realize that burning the world down burns Eliot down, too. He’s read more sci-fi than any of these guys, okay? That’s-- just. That’s not in dispute. He understands a hero narrative. He gets that Spider-Man is never supposed to pick Mary Jane (or Gwen, depending on your version) over the trainful of innocent civilians. He gets that the price of choosing Mary Jane (or Gwen) (or _Eliot_ ) is losing them all, love and humanity and heroism, all in one go.

 

The thing he’s stumbling over isn’t size, it’s probability. Because-- because there’s a _chance_ that if they do what the Monster wants them to, they’ll still be able to come up with some Hail Mary like they always seem to, that doesn’t save the day so much as delay the inevitable apocalyptic rendering, but isn’t that all anyone is ever doing, really? No one has been able to prove to him that there’s not at least a _chance_ that that will happen again this time. But if they use the spell that the others have oh-so-helpfully found (they won’t tell him exactly who it was that found it, and _what_ \-- do they think he’s going to seriously, like, take his revenge on them? Especially when he damn well already knows it was Julia?), there is zero chance that Eliot does anything but die, alone inside a Monster’s prison, while Quentin watches and can’t even hold his hand or smooth his hair back in a way that Eliot will _feel_. And Quentin has no goddamn idea how to balance those odds.

 

Penny is apparently done with his pitch on the Serious Nature of the Problem (™), and is waiting for Quentin to answer. Probably just waiting for Quentin to say some variation of “but _Eliot_ ,” so that he can say that he checked that box before he goes to find Julia and Kady and maybe even Alice and plot out how they’re going to try to go around Quentin and sacrifice Eliot for a greater good that may or may not require Eliot to be sacrificed.

 

The Monster’s chest rises. Falls.

 

“Margo’s still looking for--”

 

Penny sighs too loudly. “And if we had _time_ to _wait_ for whatever she finds, I’d be all for it. But you heard that thing. He’s got all the parts he needs. He’s doing the ritual bullshit as soon as the spell finishes juicing up the rocks. Unless _we_ stop it first.”

 

And that _does_ piss Quentin off. Because even though he’s not as irrational about this as they all seem to assume, they could at least come out and say what they really mean, instead of hiding behind strategy and euphemisms. Quentin may say his name like it’s breathing air, but at least he has the balls to say it at all.

 

“And by stop _it_ , you mean _kill Eliot_.”

 

“Yeah, I do. It’s not personal--”

 

That doesn’t warrant a response beyond the scoff that Quentin gives it.

 

“-- _it’s not personal_ , but right now there _is_ no Eliot separate from the monster. There’s just that _thing_ , and it’s coming for all of us.”

 

Quentin stares at him. “If that’s what you need to tell yourself.”

 

“No, that’s what _you_ need to tell _your_ self.” Penny is still quiet, but he’s adamant now, getting closer into Quentin’s space. A move shared by Pennies one and all, apparently. “I know you still want to believe that there’s a world where we untangle them, but--”

 

“What if it were _Julia_?”

 

Quentin doesn’t ask it to shut the conversation down, or to win the fight. He doesn’t ask it because he knows and hates that Penny’s right, that he _does_ want to believe there’s a world where they untangle the Monster from the man who stopped sleeping for a week to nurse their son through Fillorian goose pox, who kept his burning eyes locked on Quentin’s the entire time he downed the blue potion that Fogg made them take to remove all their memories, even though he’d turned Quentin down when Quentin had asked him for a shot in this lifetime. Quentin asks it because he wants someone to actually give him an answer, not a platitude. How much uncertainty is too much uncertainty to justify killing the person that every fiber of your body _needs_ to protect?

 

But Penny doesn’t give him an answer. Instead he just stares at Quentin in the dim room, not surprised and not unsurprised. Just taking it all in.

 

“So it _is_ like that, huh?” he asks in the time it takes for a police siren on the street outside to rush by and bend away to nothing.

 

Quentin doesn’t answer.

 

“Do any of the others know? Like, actually know?”

 

No, they don’t. But Quentin doesn’t need to tell Penny that. If Quentin is sure of anything, it’s that Penny and the others talk about Quentin’s _feelings_ for Eliot way more than Quentin ever has.

 

(They aren’t _feelings_. He just loves him. There’s not much more to say.)

 

Penny looks quickly over toward the Monster. “Does _he_ know?”

 

It takes Quentin a second to realize what Penny’s asking. Because-- because it’s never occurred to Quentin to point to _it_ when he means _Eliot_. But Penny thinks they’re the same, just because Eliot is in the Monster and the Monster is in Eliot.

 

“I don’t know what he knows,” Quentin admits quietly, when he does figure it out.

 

(How much uncertainty is enough uncertainty to justify killing the man you love when he may not even know that you do love him, enough to put universes at risk while you calculate the probabilities?)

 

Quentin forgets that Penny’s there, as he tries and fails to run those numbers. He must have the circumstances wrong; the answer always comes up as Eliot’s laugh-- Quentin’s favorite, which isn’t the real one or the fake one, but the one that Eliot thinks is fake but Quentin actually knows is real.

 

“He’s been working his ass off in there to help us beat this thing, looking for its secrets,” Penny says while Quentin remembers the gradations of Eliot’s smile. “He obviously doesn’t want it to win.”

 

Quentin wants an answer, he does. But he doesn’t particularly like where this one is going. So he busies himself checking to make sure that the Monster’s chest rises, then falls.

 

“Look, I’m not your-- emotional support doll, or whatever. We don’t have that relationship. But I need you to get to where we all need you to be so, if it helps? Then here’s the truth.”

 

Rises, then falls.

 

“Losing them to the evil thing-- yeah, it’s hell. But if it was-- if I were _you_? I think making them be the reason the evil thing wins? That’s probably hell, too.”

 

2.

Quentin’s been staring into the open refrigerator long enough for the light to go out when the rabbit lands on the kitchen island. He puts down the bag of carrot sticks and the takeout falafel and the container of Julia’s digestive-health yogurt, which he’d been holding in his hand long enough for it to go warm, and walks over, heart in his throat.

 

“NO NEWS FROM MARGO,” it rasps.

 

Quentin sighs and carries the rabbit to the hallway, away from the sleeping Monster, giving it a new message once it’s there. “RUNNING OUT OF TIME.”

 

Then he walks back into the apartment and returns to stand in front of the still-open refrigerator door. The Monster is snoring now, so Quentin doesn’t need to check its breathing. Instead he thinks about how he much he wishes it were Margo who’d sent the rabbit instead of Fen or Josh or whoever’s keeping him in the loop at this point. Margo wouldn’t find this difficult at all.

 

“WE’LL SAVE HIM,” she’d say.

 

“DON’T GIVE UP ASSHOLE.”

 

“LET THE WORLD BURN.”

 

 

3.

 

The carrots, a half-eaten bag of shredded cheese, and a fortune cookie wrapper are abandoned next to the sink, and Quentin’s perched on the coffee table, inches from a sleeping Monster, when Kady slips into the apartment, gun still in hand.

 

Quentin knows he instinctively positions himself between the gun and the Monster, knows that that’s only about half as sad as it sounds, because half of the instinct actually comes from how much he wishes he’d been fast enough to do that the first time-- put himself between the gun and the Monster.

 

(Quentin thinks sometimes, even though it makes him sick enough to bring up all the food he’s barely eating, that as mad as he is at the Monster and at himself and at his friends every time they act like Eliot’s death is a foregone conclusion, there is no one in the world he is madder at than Eliot himself.)

 

“This is a bad idea.”

 

Kady has one hand on her hip and has tucked the gun back into wherever she keeps it with the other. Her stance is wide, like she’s daring someone to knock her over.

 

Quentin rubs his eyes with his thumb and his index finger. They still feel filmy and unfocused when he’s done. “What’s a bad idea?”

 

“ _This_.” Kady gestures to where he’s sitting. “Watching him sleep. It blurs the lines. Not a good thing right now.”

 

That is, easily, 99% bullshit. There is never, not a single moment, that the lines come anywhere close to blurring, for Quentin. He is viscerally aware that this is _not Eliot_ . Quentin knew that when the Monster laid its head on Quentin’s shoulder in front of a sacrificial altar-- something Eliot never did, because he was always busy pulling Quentin’s head down to his own shoulder. Quentin was equally aware of it when the Monster started focusing its violence on the same spots that Eliot focused his passion, pushing where Eliot would stroke, and bruising where Eliot would . . . bruise but differently. And Quentin is no less aware of it now, since the Monster finally managed to uncross the wires between its thoughts and Eliot’s muscle memory, and Quentin finds himself constantly being murmured to in the ear or guided by the neck or toyed with at the collar by a mouth and hands that, yes, are Eliot’s, but at this moment, _are not Eliot_ ’s.

 

(There is 1% not-bullshit, though, that when he-- it-- sleeps. That’s when it looks the least not like him.)

 

(How much uncertainty is too much uncertainty to declare his own motivations here sound?)

 

“I’m just . . . keeping watch. No lines blurring.”

 

Kady rolls her eyes, then heads toward the spiral staircase, done with him. “Right. Cause what would I know about how to deal with seeing someone else wearing his _face_ everyday?”

 

Her voice is just a grumble, but it carries to him anyway. As she passes through the kitchen, she spots the counter and looks back over her shoulder. “Clean up your shit before you go to bed.”

 

She’s about to walk up the stairs and away, and Quentin’s not sure if it’s because her Tragedy of the Two Pennies is the closest analogy to what he’s dealing with right now (and it’s not really that close, because Penny-23 isn’t their Penny, and that may be an unforgivable crime to Kady, but he’s not a Monster), or whether it’s just because Kady always seems so sure about what needs to be done, and Quentin could use that right now, but he calls out to her before she can leave, keeping his voice low so that the Monster doesn’t wake up and also keeps sleeping.

 

“Don’t you have any big pep talk about how I have to embrace the Greater Good and let Eliot die?”

 

Kady crosses her arms. “No.”

 

“ _No_?”

 

“You don’t need the pep talk. You know what you have to do. You wouldn’t be watching him sleep like it’s the last time if you didn’t.”

 

Quentin knows more about sci-fi than any of these guys, but Kady was a comic-book detective. She feels the hero story in her bones, in a way that Quentin has only theorized about it, turning figures over his head, pretending that the staggering unfairness of the obvious answer makes it _wrong_.

 

Its-- the Monster’s-- _Eliot_ ’s chest rises, then falls.

 

How many more times?

 

“If it were Penny, _our_ Penny,” Quentin says, around the burning in his throat, “would you ever just-- let the world burn?”

 

Kady walks over and leans down beside Quentin, but he’s still staring at the rise and fall, rise and fall, counting however many rises and falls are left.

 

“You know the answer,” she said, “because the world’s still _here_.”

 

Her hand is on his shoulder, then it’s not.

 

“Get some sleep, Coldwater. You look like shit.”

 

 

4.

 

The microwave clock is blinking something that looks like the hieroglyphs the Monster’s had him looking up and there’s the sound of absent birds that live on a different world and died a century ago singing when their son walks up to the gold chair where Quentin has retreated.

 

“Daddy? I’m worried about Papa.”

 

Quentin blinks the sleep from his eyes and reaches for Teddy’s shoulder. He’s seven years old and carrying a stuffed rabbit that never existed on Fillory, that Quentin had carried everywhere when _he_ was four years old, even though Quentin knows that Teddy was twelve when they had this conversation for real.

 

(How much uncertainty is enough uncertainty to justify pretending that your dream is real so that you can hug your baby again?)

 

“What’s the matter, buddy?”

 

Teddy blinks brown eyes at him, sadly, and if fatherhood had taught Quentin one thing, it’s how to look at your own face and not even have to try not to hate it. “Papa’s been coughing a lot.”

 

Eliot had started coughing too much, not just when he laughed too hard or when the weather turned, the fall after Teddy turned twelve. He had insisted it was just a cold he couldn’t shake, and kept insisting it long after the point that the hoarse, sucking sound of it in the night made Quentin’s shoulders tense and his lungs protest, waiting for Eliot’s breath to uncatch before letting Quentin’s do the same.

 

(Chest rising, chest falling.)

 

Quentin had told him to go to Chatwin’s Torrent, then asked, then--when the skin that had gone from Byronic-pale to sun-flushed when they’d first moved to the mosaic started looking gray and waxy--begged. When Quentin started finding blood spatters in the elbow crook of all of Eliot’s sleeves, he yelled it and said he would hate Eliot forever and never forgive him if he didn’t. But it wasn’t until Teddy--thirteen at that point, and religiously opposed to such things--put his spindly arms around Eliot’s neck and said “Pop, _please_ ” that Eliot packed a bag and went off and came back a week and a half later able to race Teddy through the woods for hours, and--as long as Teddy stayed out in the woods with his friends--fuck Quentin for even longer, breathing “I’m sorry” between every thrust.

 

Quentin tightens his arm around Teddy’s shoulders and presses a kiss to the top of his pin-straight hair. “I promise he’ll be okay.”

 

“But Mommy--”

 

Quentin squeezes his eyes shut, but then opens them again because he doesn’t know if closing your eyes in a dream means you have to wake up. “I know, buddy. But that was different. I promise I’ll keep him safe. I’ll do anything.”

 

Teddy looks up at Quentin, and he’s not seven anymore but forty with thinning hair and glasses that made him look a little like Eliot even though biologically that doesn’t make any sense. He’s older than Quentin is now-- Quentin’s son is older than him.

 

(Eliot’s son is maybe older than Eliot will ever be.)

 

“You’ve done a lot already, Dad,” he says. “You’ve taken really good care of him.”

 

He leans closer and puts his arm around Quentin’s shoulder, kisses the top of Quentin’s head.

 

Quentin’s son is older than Quentin is, and maybe that means he knows better.

 

“What if-- what if I can’t keep him safe anymore?”

 

Teddy just squeezes the arm around Quentin tighter. “It’s not so bad in the afterlife. I’d look after him. Until you get there.”

 

Quentin clenches his jaw tighter and tighter because this is absolution he can never take, because he said he’d do-- _anything_.

 

“He could see the kids again. They miss their Poppop. They’ve been saving up decades of gossip.”

 

Quentin closes his eyes anyway, then, despite the risk of waking, because he can’t look at Teddy when he asks, “How can I be sure that you’re telling me the truth? Or if it’s just my brain telling me what I need to hear to do this?”

 

Teddy’s chest is a solid weight under Quentin’s aching head, and Quentin can’t be entirely sure that it still _is_ Teddy, or if it’s Ted, now. It’s probably both. He skates his hand over Quentin’s hair.

 

“Well, Curly-Q, how sure do you need to be?”

 

 

5.

 

Quentin is gasping awake from his dream when Julia kneels in front of the gold chair, one hand on his forehead.

 

“Shh, Q. Shh. It’s okay.”

 

That’s a fucking lie. He had a son once, and a father, and Eliot. He never had all three at once, though. It’s pretty bullshit, then, that now he has to _not_ have all three at once.

 

“Have you been out here all night?”

 

Julia is whispering, which must mean the Monster is still--

 

Quentin jolts up off the chair, looking for the couch and for it-- _him_ . Looking for _it_ and searching always for _him_. “Is it--”

 

“Still sleeping.”

 

Quentin’s eyes re-adjust to the dark and he spots it, just as it was. For a second, Quentin can’t tell if its chest is rising-falling, and it terrifies him. But in the terror, there’s something else, too, and Quentin is terrified a second time that it might be _hope_ \-- hope that something will happen to take this choice off of his shoulders. _No_ , not _something_ . No strategy, no euphemisms: _say it_ . Hope that _Eliot_ will _die_ in its sleep, so that Quentin won’t have to decide whether to kill him.

 

Quentin’s not even fucking certain that it _is_ hope. Maybe it’s all just terror in different flavors, enough for a banquet that Quentin can’t even taste. The one thing he _is_ certain about is that he hates himself for even wondering.

 

Or, that he hates _it_ for making him wonder.

 

Or, that he hates _him_ for leaving him all alone with decisions he can’t possibly be expected to make.

 

(It’s a clever monster, Quentin knows, that makes you hate the cost of ransoming your beloved from its clutches as much as you hate the fact that it has clutches at all.)

 

“Q, you should try to get some sleep, in an actual bed--”

 

Julia’s eyes are soft and worried in the darkness and Quentin just wants an answer so badly, he prays for one.

 

“Jules, what do I do? I don’t know if I can--”

 

Julia keeps petting the hair falling on his forehead. “You’ll do what you believe is right. Whatever that is.”

 

Quentin’s eyes roll to the ceiling and he hears the Monster snore-- _alive_ \--and he feels gut-deep _relief_ in spite of everything. “What if I don’t know what’s right anymore?”

 

“Then you’ll do your best.”

 

Her hand in Quentin’s hair is soft and familiar. She is his oldest friend, and he loves her, and he’s scared that he’s going to let a Monster rip her limbs off to save Eliot. And he’s equally scared that he _won’t_.

 

“Are you only acting so calm and accepting about all of this because you know you’re going to use the spell you found to kill him, no matter what I want?”

 

Quentin might be asking so that he can say something noble like, _if anyone does it, it should be me._ He might be asking so that he can have the phony-guts to say _let the world burn_ , secure in the knowledge that Julia will put the fire out before it spreads too far. He might be asking so that he can kill them all, rip off their limbs himself, if they come anywhere near Eliot.

 

(He might be asking so that he can pretend it’s that last one, to give them an excuse to kill him, too.)

 

Julia’s hand falters, but only briefly. “You really should go to bed, okay? There’s still a couple hours before it’s light.”

 

Quentin nods, but he stays put. She walks away down the hall to the bedroom where she’s been sleeping, and Quentin sees that it’s the same one that Penny-23 disappeared to earlier.

 

It must be contagious, being this fucking selfish in one area of your life. Because Quentin never thought he’d begrudge Julia any happiness. But he begrudges her _this_ : that she is going to go curl up beside someone who loves her. Because Quentin wants-- Quentin _wants_ to curl up with the father of his son, or the friend who broke his heart, or the upperclassman who looks at him sometimes like he wants to know what’s happening under all the hoodies and plaid. Quentin would take any one of the above. But the only thing he has to sleep beside is a _monster_.

 

(And he still might end the world, for this not to be the last night.)

 

 

 

(+1?)

 

The sun is beginning to come in through the blinds and Quentin is sitting on the couch, two feet away, when the arms rise and the ribs twist and the eyes blink open, once then twice.

 

“Quentin?” A sigh.

 

Then the eyes go harder and duller, and--

 

~~+1~~

 

\--and Quentin looks away.

 

“Quentin,” it repeats itself. “Are you ready to help me with my ritual today finally.”

 

Quentin doesn’t answer. It continues to stretch out Eliot’s skin. It wriggles up and lays its head in Quentin’s lap. It looks up at Quentin’s face, while Quentin stares at his own nails on the couch cushion.

 

“This body dreams sometimes, did you know. Especially after something has to get killed.” It clucks its tongue. “It doesn’t like when something has to get killed. The dreams are-- different.”

 

No, the body wouldn’t like the killing. _Eliot_ wouldn’t like the killing.

 

_Eliot_ , who learned he had magic by killing a bully and has hated himself everyday since.

 

_Eliot_ , who killed the demon possessing his boyfriend and then began slowly and determinedly killing _himself_ until a knife-maker stepped in with a more elegant punishment.

 

_Eliot_ , who--if the stories Quentin’s been told are true--couldn’t even kill the man who tried to assassinate him, and fought a duel with an expert swordsman so his country wouldn’t have to go to war.

 

_Eliot_ , who has spent every day in the monster’s head hunting for its secrets to make sure it doesn’t get the chance to do the very thing that Quentin has to-- that Quentin can’t-- that Quentin isn’t sure he can bring himself to stop it from doing.

 

(How certain do you have to be that the man you love is a truer hero than you can ever be, before it’s okay to put a dagger through his heart?)

 

(How certain?)

 

( _El_ , do you know? How certain?)

 

“Wet,” the Monster is saying, and it brings--

 

_(+1)_

 

\--it brings your hand up to brush at the tears that I didn’t know were falling. “You’re crying. Why.”

 

The pads of your fingers are on my cheeks and I tell it, “Because sometimes you have to sacrifice for the ones you love.”

 

Your hand slides to my jaw.

 

“And I am one you love.”

 

I don’t say yes, I don’t tell _it_ anything, but I nod against your palm. You are. You are the one I love.

 

“What sacrifice will you make for me, Quentin,” it asks.

 

“I don’t know.” I say it into your skin. “I’m still not sure.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading.


End file.
